


How to Win Friends and Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

by Peapods



Series: ...without really trying [1]
Category: Pundit RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-25
Updated: 2011-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-15 01:44:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peapods/pseuds/Peapods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anderson has never read Dale Carnegie. "Assertiveness in the Workplace" had also passed him by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Win Friends and Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to a fellow LJ/Twitter/Texting/Life friend without whom I would have not have even written this.

He had a long night and not a very restful morning, so he can be forgiven his confusion when he enters his office and Keith Olbermann is sitting in the visitor’s chair.

Like this is something he does every day.

“Um,” Anderson says.

\------------------------------------

Growing up with Gloria Vanderbilt as a mother lent one a rather unique perspective and experience with absurdity. It’s been three days since Keith showed up at his office and Anderson hasn’t really had the heart to kick him out. Because he keeps showing up. His staff seems to take their cues from him and leave him alone.

\-------------------------------------

Anderson is having Ricky Gervais on to talk about the missishness of Hollywood and their inability to see past the tips of their egos. Keith, he has discovered, has a way of letting Anderson know he is interested in being included and Anderson usually just shrugs and hands him his research. He’s not paying him so he figures it for pro bono work and doesn’t tell MSNBC. Not that he’s had real occasion to go mentioning that fact to the higher ups there. He doesn’t talk to them regularly. Or at all. And no one at CNN has complained so he just carries on with it.

Keith, wearing a plaid shirt Anderson is pretty sure he owned back when he was on Channel One, has become a weird sort of fixture. Like a parrot, perched on the sofa, ready with an opinion. And a better vocabulary.

The first day, Keith brings a sack lunch and munches carrots and drinks a cup of soup while Anderson picks the cranberries out of his salad.

The second day, it’s pimento cheese on pumpernickel and Anderson makes a face and steals it from him, dumping it in the trash and ordering from the Chinese place.

“You’ve gotta stay on Ricky,” Keith suggests. “He’s not so good when he’s being serious, but if you ask him questions the right way he’ll give you what you want.”

Anderson just wants to know how people in the limelight everyday can’t grow a thick skin.

“You may be a tad biased,” Keith fixes him with a pointed look.

Anderson shrugs.

\-----------------------------------------

So, that happens.

They go out for lunch one day because there is finally a break from dreary, snowy weather and the walk is brisk and not toe-curling.

Keith’s been snooping on Anderson’s computer again.

“Who won?” he asks, showing the picture he’s obviously printed off. Also obviously, Anderson will have to get another print cartridge from storage.

“I don’t know, the blue team?”

He doesn’t ask about the man standing next to Anderson, just the small child in the brand new jersey, looking for all the world like he’s just received the greatest birthday present ever.

\-----------------------------------------

There’s a script sitting on Anderson’s desk that used to be black and white.

The dominant shade, now, is red.

“Your syntax is shoddy, your vocabulary deplorable, and I’m pretty sure 3rd graders have been known to write longer sentences,” Keith explains from the couch when he looks up in question. “Also, do you have some issue with the correct spelling of the word ‘tonight’?”

Anderson blinks. Then opens up the word document and starts making changes.

\------------------------------------------

They’ve noticed. Anderson can’t define who ‘they’ are. But there are whispers and furrowed brows and he’d be offended but, yeah, since Keith has begun editing his scripts--sometimes rewriting whole swathes, his audience has taken a lot more interest.

Anderson shrugs. He’s tried to make some of this stuff interesting, but everyone knows when he says he likes politics that he means he likes the fact that covering them also means covering the things he cares about. Keith makes him seem erudite.

So, he has to sort of lie and say he’s gotten a new editor. Which is also sort of the truth. Except that Keith is in his office flipping a quarter and counting how many times in a row he gets tails.

\------------------------------------------

“I think we should take a break,” Ben says, and there’s a brave little soldier tilt to his chin that Anderson finds really unattractive. He’s a little surprised. Looks left, looks right.

“Huh?”

“You’re just not all here, Andy, and it’s a real change from how things have been. Which was great until 2 months ago.”

Anderson has never been very good at this. Upkeep of a relationship is harder work than reporting about dead bodies in the street.

“I’m just gonna go back to my place for awhile. Gimme a call in a few weeks, okay?”

He leaves shortly after with a few more bags than Anderson thought were necessary for a ‘break’. He’s already mentally dividing up the tupperware. If Anderson even owned any of it. Maybe gray t-shirts were a better measure.

\------------------------------------------

Someone made a Risk analogy on the show tonight and Keith is aflutter. Generally, he’s gone by the time the broadcast is over. He stayed once to berate Anderson for letting someone get away with something, but then had relented when he realized Anderson had gone glassy-eyed from his cold medication. He had stayed another time because they accidentally almost got drunk in the middle of the day. He’d passed out on the couch. They were grown men and should know how to drink, but at 8 pm Anderson’s assistant had been in the doorway, staring in shock, looking like she wanted to cry and Anderson had been desperately hoping that drinking the vile office coffee and eating his weight in Taco Bell would somehow create the illusion of sobriety.

It hadn’t, but thankfully Keith had written the script before the ill-advised drinking had commenced.

So, Risk. Anderson remembers playing with Carter, but his older brother had always been able to beat him at it. Anderson never followed the advice of getting onto New Guinea and just building. He’d always take Africa and then all his little plastic men would die horribly in an Asian land war.

Keith’s version of Risk is a little more... involved. It involves several boards and rules that have Anderson reaching for the remaining whiskey. They’ve got Lord of the Rings Risk and Star Wars Risk and normal Risk and there are coins and other things scattered around to make Stargates and, yes, Anderson saw the movie, but mostly for James Spader so the concept is a little unfamiliar.

His ass is, of course, thoroughly kicked.

\-----------------------------------------

“So, you being here,” Anderson starts, trying to decide if his cavalry would be better suited on Tatooine or if he should just keep them in Minas Tirith and get driven out to sea.

Keith raises an eyebrow.

“Yeah, all right,” Anderson says.

Tatooine. Definitely Tatooine.

\-----------------------------------------

It gets a little ridiculous.

\-----------------------------------------

Possibly, it was a little ridiculous before.

\------------------------------------------

“Do you wanna go out to my house this weekend?” Anderson asks. It’s his first weekend out and he’s got a lot of work to get done, but he could use the company. He hasn’t called Ben. Ben hasn’t called. The movers were by the week before.

Keith is thumbing through the transcript of an interview that Anderson is using to ‘gotcha’ Sarah Palin. He really has very few qualms about making her look like an enormous idiot. Keith’s got a highlighter between his teeth, Anderson winces at the thought of slobber, and has lost his loafers at some point. He has very nice feet.

“I don’t have to do anything, do I?”

“Uh.”

\------------------------------------------

They’re listening to Motown because they can’t really agree on much else. Sure, Anderson has _heard_ the Eagles, but he can’t really hear the difference between Joe Walsh and Don Henley. Anderson doesn’t even try Scissor Sisters or The Clash on Keith. He knows a lost cause when he sees one.

Usually.

They stop at a gourmet BP to fill the tank and eat breakfast sandwiches with real, stacked up, ham and all the juice runs out of Anderson’s foil and turns his shirt piss yellow. He sighs and drags a t-shirt from the trunk. It’s too cold for it really, but they’ll be in the car again and he has sweaters at the--

Keith shoves his hoodie at him and drains his tea. Anderson tries not to dance too noticeably to ‘Dance to the Music.’

\----------------------------------------

Anderson bought a fixer-upper on purpose. It’s kind of his hobby. There’s always something that needs replacing or sanding or tightening or painting. This trip he finds nothing wrong to fix and has to resort to the work that pays him. He ends up with books opened all over the coffee table and the stubborn will to stay there while Keith watches a baseball game. The Yankees must have played yesterday or Anderson is sure Keith wouldn’t be here.

His MLB blog has gotten a lot of attention lately.

He gives up in the 5th inning when Keith starts to get a look on his face. Like he’s about to hurl one his mother’s statues through the wall mounted flat screen.

“Not going well?”

“I love ‘em, but even I can admit when the Yankees are sucking.”

\----------------------------------------

“You said you didn’t know me personally,” Keith says as they try and sit through some godawful movie on HBO.

“Huh?” Keith’s eloquence hasn’t really rubbed off on him.

“Back when I left, you were doing your show and you said you didn’t know me personally even though we’d worked and met a handful of times.”

“And?”

“That doesn’t count as personal to you?”

Anderson feels like there is a vital clue here.

“No? We did a few things on air and did some banter off. I’ve had deeper relationships with cab drivers. In foreign countries, I’ll grant you--”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Ah.”

Oh.

\-------------------------------------------

“So, you wanted me to get to know you,” Anderson guesses.

Keith shrugs. “Your reaction was very interesting to me given some of the not very pleasant things I’ve had to say about you.”

Anderson gives him a slightly pitying look. “Keith, if I judged everyone by what they had to say about me...”

“Right,” Keith says, looking admonished. Keith might be known to a wider audience, but his caustic relationship with the world has nothing to do with oh, say, being an unconfirmed homosexual, the son of one of the most famous socialites in the world, and pretty.

The comparison of his reticence to talk about his personal life to Bush lying about the Iraq War wasn’t even the cruelest thing Anderson had heard that _week_.

“I’m not that vindictive.”

“That much is obvious.”

\--------------------------------------------

So, now it’s all noticed and on the radar and all because off a photo taken at a BP with Anderson shirtless and Keith’s hair askew from yanking his hoodie over his head.

Keith isn’t in his office on Tuesday, or Wednesday. Anderson is a bit bereft, trying to scare up an English major somewhere to help edit this latest script. He checks HuffPo and Mediaite and, Jesus, even Twitter, but all parties are mum.

All _relevant_ parties. FOX is claiming conspiracy, Perez is claiming gay sex scandal, and his mother wants to know why he’s friends with someone who wears a maroon suit without irony.

\-------------------------------------------

Keith is wearing a suit and he’s shaven and crisp when Anderson arrives Thursday. He looks sheepish.

“It’s been pointed out to me that--”

Anderson just waves it away. “Full suit?”

“Meeting.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been released from my non-compete.”

Anderson grimaces. “Does this mean I have to start paying you?”

\-------------------------------------------

They go to dinner. Keith is already in a suit and Anderson swaps out his jeans for slacks.

$14 is too much to pay for mac & cheese, but it tastes damn good.

\-------------------------------------------

“So.”

“So.”

Anderson snorfles out a really unattractive laugh and covers his mouth and nose with his hand.

“Look, it’s not that the thought of kissing you is making me laugh,” Anderson says, still laughing.

Keith looks like he wants to be offended, but he must realize that it’s hilarious because he’s laughing too. It’s a wheezing laugh that collapses him against the wall outside Anderson’s apartment (Ben got the firehouse in the breakup because Anderson could no longer subject himself to the joke).

He finally gets a hold of himself and tugs on Keith’s vest. He comes forward, still smiling, and they press their lips together.

It’s nice. Not earth-shattering, but Anderson’s never had one of those with anyone he wasn’t in love with. Nice is actually pretty far up there on his scale.

Keith pulls away and licks his lips.

“Should have had the mac & cheese.”


End file.
